The Internet Sucks

Steve Maich has an excellent, provocative article on the Internet in Macleans magazine.  Excerpt:

After 15 years and a trillion dollars of investment, just about everything we've been told about the Internet and what the information age would mean has come up short.

The idealists who conceived and pioneered the Web described a kind of enlightened utopia built on mutual understanding, a world in which knowledge is limited only by one's curiosity. Instead, we have constructed a virtual Wild West, where the masses indulge their darkest vices, pirates of all kinds troll for victims, and the rest of us have come to accept that cyberspace isn't the kind of place you'd want to raise your kids. The great multinational exchange of ideas and goodwill has devolved into a food fight. And the virtual marketplace is a great place to get robbed. The answers to the great questions of our world may be out there somewhere, but finding them will require you to first wade through an ocean of misinformation, trivia and sludge. We have been sold a bill of goods. We're paying for it through automatic monthly withdrawals from our PayPal accounts.

Let's put this in terms crude enough for all cyber-dwellers to grasp. The Internet sucks.

Link: Macleans.ca | Top Stories | Life | Pornography, gambling, lies, theft and terrorism: The Internet sucks,

via Valleywag.